BIOINFORMATICS ? PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The Bioinformatics Core (BIC) will provide the hardware, software, and critical human expertise infrastructure necessary to manage, integrate, analyze, interpret, and disseminate data produced by Cancer Center investigators, and will provide much-needed bioinformatics and quantitative training in critically high demand among Cancer Center members. The BIC is staffed by experts who have years of collective experience in managing and analyzing large-scale, high-throughput biological data. The very nature of cancer research is evolving, driven by the ease and plummeting costs of generating vast amounts of sequence, expression, structure, and biochemical data. Extracting the most biological meaning from these data will require sophisticated bioinformatics expertise that most individual labs do not possess. Further, the size and complexity of these data requires robust data management planning, and funding agencies often require permanent archival and rapid public dissemination of high-throughput data to the broader cancer research community. Additionally, as cancer research continues to become more data-intensive, researchers often lack the bioinformatics and quantitative training that is increasingly essential. The BIC fills all of these gaps and will serve an absolutely essential role in the immediate and long-term realization of the Cancer Center's research mission.